Thinkspace is pleased to present Reflections of a New Generation\, featuring new work by
Ekundayo\, Joram Roukes\, and Ad
am Caldwell. These three distinct artists are unified by a painter
ly approach to their subject matter and by a tendency towards the surreal.
Each works from a unique set of influences and introjects a personal dimens
ion into that of the cultural. Gleaning inspiration from subculture\, perso
nal experience\, and art history\, each has developed a style entirely thei
r own that speaks to a complex locus of coexisting cultural sensibilities.
While their work remains graphic and representational\, their painterly exe
cution tends towards the expressionistic and the emotive. Each artist's con
tribution speaks powerfully to the potential of the new contemporary moveme
nt to explore the conflicted accretions of our contemporaneity.

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Ekundayo is a Hawaii based ar
tist\, having spent many years here in LA prior to moving back home recentl
y. The artist's mixed media work harnesses the visual power of the subconsc
ious through hyperbole and juxtaposition. Owing to his mastery of a surreal
grotesque and his early beginnings as a graffiti artist\, Ekundayo's work
is monumental and larger than life. The artist's intuitive recombinations a
re uncanny and haunting\, and betray an understanding of life's most aberra
nt and disturbing dimensions. Ekundayo channels the sordid and the abject\,
but mobilizes the imaginary to attenuate its ravages through fantasy. The
artist combines the human with the animal to explore a conflicted interconn
ectedness\, and creates imagery that is allegorical and even mythological a
t times. Much like an idyllic nightmare\, beauty exists with deformity in i
ts midsts. Ekundayo combines the monstrous and the teratological with the b
eautiful and the redemptive\, to convey a profound empathy for the duality
of the human condition.

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Jor
am Roukes is a painter based in the Netherlands\, and a recent add
ition to the Thinkspace roster. His works delve into the inherent contradic
tions of Western culture with seething wit and abrupt adjacency. His works
are painterly recombinations of daily imagery wielded into a Frankensteinia
n grotesque that is at once expressionistic and representational\; familiar
and yet dissonant. His composites are at times violent and jarring\, even
abject and intensely surreal\, as he combines the human with the animal and
the inanimate to the point of abstraction. In Roukes' work\, the represent
ational is delivered with the expressionistic force of the abstract express
ionists and the graphic precision of the illustrator. Interested in the fal
lacies of consumer culture\, Roukes draws from daily life to seek out poeti
c discord from the familiarity of the mundane.

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Adam Caldwell is a Bay area painter whose wo
rk explores the intersection of the psychological and the cultural. Taking
stylistic elements from abstract expressionism and classical figuration\, a
nd combining them with the pop cultural and the illustrative\, Caldwell ama
lgamates distinct and seemingly adverse vocabularies to invoke contemporary
conflicts. With an interest in the thematic exploration of self and other\
, present and past\, identity and gender\, the artist explores the polariti
es of the colonized self with a social and political conscience. Caldwell's
work unfolds like a surreal psychological tableau\, presenting a simultane
ity of antagonisms and unresolved impulses: life set against death\, the se
rious in concert with the absurd\, the beautiful coexisting alongside the a
bject. These juxtapositions of violent classicism and seductive destruction
challenge the feigned simplicity of our cultural paradigms.